Digital video transmission has rapidly grown in popularity because of the robustness of features and services. Notably, this technology provides many benefits to the consumer in the form of access to an expansive channel lineup and on-demand/interactive services, while minimizing the amount of bandwidth needed by the service provider for these services. Such transmission can be delivered via satellite, cable or fiber optics. For example, cable systems can employ 6 MHZ analog video and/or digital Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) channels that are frequency division multiplexed (FDM) across the 500-1000 MHZ cable bandwidth. In typical satellite systems, several compressed digital video programs are time division multiplexed (TDM) into a single 10-40 Mbit/s Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) or Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) modulated C- or K-band carrier. However, this digital transmission technology imposes a number of technical requirements that may be hard to satisfy using existing house video wiring systems. For example, in order to decode digital video into an analog form that can be viewed by traditional television sets, a converter box is required for each set. In some instances, this can be problematic as there may be no room available for the box close to the set and within line-of-sight from the viewing area for operation of a remote controller.
Many digital video implementations also require a higher signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio than analog systems to produce acceptable video images. Installations that have old wiring or video splitters in the walls may have difficulty achieving the required signal-to-noise ratios. Moreover, such wiring systems can even block the entire spectrum of the digital transmissions if they were installed before deployment of digital video transmission standards. Moreover, older splitters can also block the return channel for interactive services over the digital video box, thereby preventing their use by the customer. Since each decoder box outputs only a single channel, it is also difficult to use such features as Picture In Picture (PIP) and recording one channel while viewing another.
Traditional approaches to the above issues include rewiring of the premises with cabling that is suitable for digital video, and utilizing transmitter/receiver units to bypass the wiring. Rewiring for most premises can be prohibitively expensive. Both of these approaches require a device at each set; and even two devices are needed where Picture-In-Picture (PIP) or simultaneous recording is being used. The retransmission boxes also consume bandwidth in the facility (either Radio Frequency spectrum or Internet bandwidth), and necessitates a patchwork of separate devices to be linked together.
Therefore, there is a need for providing digital video transmission over extant wiring facilities without incurring high deployment costs for the service provider or the consumers.